Negative, Ghost Rider, the Pattern is Full

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed. Or sad. I am both of those things. Though the sad definitely started yesterday, as the vague and nameless certainty of failure reared its head, seized me about the midsection, and dragged me out of the rest of my day. The truth is, I have always secretly, deeply believed that having a kid was just not something that I was going to do. It just didn't seem possible. I had a horror of my pregnant body, for one thing. But it also just seemed.... unpossible. Like flight. I don't have wings, either. After I got married, when people would ask me when I planned to have kids, I would be baffled in the same way as if I'd been asked when wings would sprout from my shoulder blades and carry me into the sky.

So the sadness is real, and the disappointment is real. But if I'm honest, right now I'm feeling a lot of relief. That's pretty fucked up, but there it is. I have learned, in my majority, that uncertainty is very hard for me to take. That I can take a negative outcome much more smoothly than uncertainty. Give me a no, by God. Give me a no and I can move on. Stuff your maybes and your possiblys. A yes is good, yesses can be great, and I've been fortunate to have some pretty spectacular yesses here and there. Statistically impossible yesses. That I should now be faced with a statistically predicable no does not take away from the good fortune that I have already enjoyed.

I have a boat, for Christ's sake.

I can imagine the person my mythical child would be, and I know for some people the loss of that imaginary person is hard to take. But I imagine people for a living. Succotash, God love you, but you are no more real - are in fact, less real - than the protagonist of my first novel, who lived in my mind much longer than you have. She is out there, in the world now, living in other people's heads. I have no control over how they feel about her, or what they do with her. She is remembered differently by different people, forgotten sometimes, hated on occasion. I have a little control over her life now as I would over yours, once you started to encounter the world for yourself.

So, this relief. First, I'm relieved because it means that this cycle is finally over. Good lord, but I'm glad it's over. I hated all the shots. I hated the mindless probing, the digging in my veins. I got to enjoy the acupuncture, lying there watching balls of ultraviolet and yellow blob and morph into each other. But at $125 a pop, and even more needles, I'm ready for a break. I loathed getting up in the morning, dumping $30 a day on cab fare because I couldn't face the rush hour crush on the train, and I wanted to get home fast enough to go back to bed. God, the money, Succotash. I can't imagine how much differently I would feel if this failed cycle, in addition to costing me in emotion and time, had also cost me $15,000 dollars.

One more cycle. That, I can do. Two, max, depending on what Dr. Big Guns says, or what we learn, if we learn anything. So part of my relief, to be honest, is that I am one step closer to the definitive no. A no that I can know, and understand, and accept, before I go on and become whoever it is that I am set to be.